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Unreal red light inked itself onto a light standard on 142 St last night as I waited to cross the road. The temporary red on the pole was cast from the overhead traffic signal. I was on my bicycle, headed downtown for a newspaper.

Memory tugged.

We had a radio when I was a boy. It sat in a small, black cabinet about a foot and half high and as much wide and it had a black handle on the top. The dial glided across the numbers under the illuminated glass display as I wheeled the knob back and forth. That tiny stick of light glowed like a match. Or a lure in the water. For hours, I sat transfixed in the dark in my basement room listening to voices from afar. At night, stations from Seattle and even California pulsed in. It was eerie, that crackle, those voices that came from out there. Augusta La Paix brought Billy Bragg in. Len Thuesen brought Mark Knopfler in. I loved it.

These memories swirled up last night as I rode the multi-use path in Glenora. It was black, chilly, windy. I was a…

I recorded on Strava my bicycle ride to the post office at Shopper's Drug Mart this afternoon, and sent a quiet thank you out to Lana Stewart for the prescription.
This is Lana in de pecha (kucha) mode earlier this year in Montréal:

She was making a point that has stuck. Here goes: riding a bicycle to work is a lot of work. For the newcomer, there's a lot of obstacles. Safety in traffic, changes of clothes, storage, sweating, matted hair, risk of bike theft, mild ridicule, change of weather, and so on. Why the fascination with getting people interested in riding a bicycle to go from zero to workplace? Why not instead encourage people to make the simple rides, the neighbourhood trips to the grocery store, the bakery, the liquor store, or the post office? Better to build local and solid by encouraging wanna-be-again bicycle riders to make trips to the locations that, if they're fortunate, sit within one or two kilometres from home.